If Eric Klinenberg ’93 is correct, a momentous cultural change is going
on largely unnoticed: in record numbers, people are choosing to live
alone.

As social animals, human beings have always lived in groups, whether in
nuclear or extended families. For most humans, life has followed the
same cycle: grow up with parents, find a mate, and raise children.

According to Klinenberg’s ground breaking and fascinating new book, Going Solo,
over the past fifty years that has changed. Now more than half of
American adults are what he calls “singletons”—individuals living
alone—and they account for 28 percent of households. They outnumber
childless couples and nuclear families. (Klinenberg excludes from these
numbers people living alone involuntarily in prisons and nursing
homes.)

It might be tempting to chalk up this trend to American
individualism, but Klinenberg reports that the development is even more
pronounced in countries with strong social welfare systems. In Sweden,
for instance, 47 percent of households contain just one person. In the
city of Stockholm, singletons make up an astounding 60 percent of
households.

Klinenberg, an ethnographer who teaches at New York University, was
asked to do this study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and he
says he conceded reluctantly. His first book, Heat Wave,
was about the 1995 catastrophe that killed 750 people in Chicago.
Analyzing the death toll, he’d discovered that a disproportionate
number of the victims were men who lived and died alone, isolated from
friends and family who might have saved them. Although women are more
likely to live alone, he observed, men are far more likely to die
alone.

Klinenberg says he had no personal interest in the topic. No
singleton, he and his wife, Caitlin Zaloom ’95, have two children. But,
he writes, “I recognized that I had come to [the subject] through its
bleakest angle, and decided that by learning the story of how and why
so many of us have come to live alone, I might also discover
something fundamental about who we are and what we value today.”

Over seven years, he and a team of researchers interviewed more than
300 adults living alone in New York City, Chicago, Austin, San
Francisco, and Washington, D.C., as well as in other countries with
high rates of solitary living: England, France, Sweden, Japan, and
Australia. They questioned a wide range of people: newly independent
twenty- and thirty-somethings, men and women living alone after a
divorce, widows and widowers, wealthy homeowners, apartment dwellers,
and tenants in single-room-occupancy dwellings.

Lest we place too much significance on solo living as the new black,
Klinenberg points out that for most adults it’s a temporary
arrangement, a consequence of other cultural changes. As young people
wait longer to marry, for example, they often shed roommates and go out
on their own as a kind of rite of passage, a signal to others that
they’ve arrived. Living alone gives young men and women the opportunity
to learn valuable life skills and to reflect on the kind of person they
might want to marry.

With 50 percent of U.S. marriages ending in divorce and the rate of
remarriage dropping, many middle-aged men and women enter a second
phase of solitary living. Although many of these interviewees reported
feeling lonely at times, Klinenberg says they were less so than when
they’d felt trapped in unhappy relationships. He was particularly moved
by the number of women who described busy lives—happily balancing work,
friendships, family, and other obligations. Many told him they had no
time to date, and in some cases weren’t particularly eager to jump back
into a partnership.

While the idea of aging alone has an ominous ring to it, Klinenberg
reports that only 2 percent of widows and 20 percent of widowers
remarry, and only 20 percent of the elderly live with one of their
children. Instead, he says, they choose “intimacy at a distance.”
Several widows described their reluctance to take on the job of
caretaker to a husband who would likely die before them. They preferred
to live separately, maintaining these intimate relationships while
continuing to attend lectures and play mahjong and bridge with friends.

This is not to say that living alone is always easy. Klinenberg found
that the late thirties and early forties can be deeply painful for
single women, whose biological clocks may be ticking loudly. Aging
alone is especially dangerous for men, he reports. Without the skills
that enable many women to build social networks, older men can become
isolated and vulnerable. Other risk factors include poverty, illness,
depression, and living in a dangerous neighborhood.

These findings may sound alarming to admirers of Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Robert N. Bellah’s Habits of the Heart,
both of which warned that individualism is undermining America’s
collective spirit. Klinenberg praises both of these books, but he is
more sanguine about the consequences of our experiment in solitary
living. He argues that instead of providing a hothouse for narcissism,
living alone affords modern city dwellers sorely needed time and space
for solitary reflection. Just as Thoreau’s solitude at Walden Pond was
interspersed with meals at his mother’s house and visits with his
Concord friends, many adults today use their apartments as temporary
havens from an over-connected world. We come home, get our bearings,
and go out to brunch with friends.

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.